Ask the Food Fairy!

My car eats pretty much the same thing I do: delicious golden fat. Mine tends to come in the form of olive oil or coconut butter (the latter is white, but still); my car’s, according to BioFuel Oasis, currently comes from recycled vegetable oil (canola?) formerly used to fry potato chips.

I don’t really understand what the hell is going on with fuel prices right now. I mean, you know, we start a war that is at least in part around oil and the prices go up steadily – ok, I get that. But why is it spiking now? It’s freaking $5.29 for biodiesel right this second, maybe more, about what diesel costs around here.

I could look through a newspaper or something to figure it out, but I don’t care enough. Because I am preparing to switch over to run mainly on waste vegetable oil. This is awesome for three reasons:

1. It burns way, way cleaner than gas or “dino-diesel”;
2. It is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay cheaper (I’ve seen it for $1.50-$4 a gallon, and obviously I’d rather pay $1.50….);
3. It diverts all that used fryer oil from the landfills and puts it to good use again instead.

I thought this would be a good place to talk about this stuff not only because it’s food-related, and saving-money-related, but also because this is going to fuel all those trips to the store for <a href=/peacemeals>PeaceMeals</a> as well. I only wish I knew of a green shipping company. When’s that going to happen? They’d make a freaking bundle.

So here’s my problem. I have the money, the desire, and the mechanic all ready to convert my car. I know I want a two-tank system, probably, because that allows me to have one tank where the WVO (waste veggie oil) can get heated up and thinned out so it doesn’t clog the engine, and one full of (thinner, no special changes necessary) biodiesel that I can use when the WVO isn’t heated up. Or if it runs out, I guess.

But what I don’t have is a decision about what kit to use. There are two I like: PlantDrive, because they are cheap and good and they have a setup where you can basically let the oil sit for a few weeks and then filter it straight into your car. (A lot of people get fancy machines that filter the oil for them, and dewater it if it’s been sitting out, say, in some restaurant’s parking lot in the rain and damp. That sounds like a lot of extra hassle and cost, to me.) Plus, they have good attention to detail and seem very honest; they say things like, “As for hoseclamps: we give you a phone # for McMaster-Carr and the part number for their finest hoseclamps, and if you order before 5 and you live west of the Mississippi you’ll have your clamps by 10 AM the next morning, 10 AM the following day if you’re east of the Mississippi. You’ll pay less than if we included them in the kit and you can easily order more if you add a heating component like a HotFox or HotPlate later The cost for an average passenger car for hose and clamps will be under $150, and for a truck, under $200.” PlantDrive’s two-tank kit with the really good filter is $615. But they don’t include tanks, because there are so many different potential sizes and things, so I’d have to talk to my mechanic about what to get, whether he has a cheap source for those; a 20-gallon tank from these folks would be about $715. (My ‘82 Mercedes has a 21-gallon tank originally, and I think a big tank is a good idea especially with weird fuel. Also, you can see why I love them – they even link to other companies that sell tanks.)

The other one is VegRev, because they have a little thing called “The Co-Pilot Computer Controller” that handles all the heating up and switching over for you for $350. But then on the other hand, it sounds like PlantDrive’s system heats up quickly enough that that wouldn’t even be necessary. The other thing about VegRev is that they sell filtered vegetable oil to their customers for $2 a gallon.

And, right now, ONLY to their customers – that is, they don’t consider people buying fuel to be customers because they choose not to make any profit on the fuel. Instead, they see it as a way to bring in more customers for WVO conversion kits. I had a fairly pushy, icky conversation with someone there where he just kept pressuring me to get one of their conversions and then gloated about what a great tool the WVO sales are to bring in customers… which, frankly, left me not wanting to have any more interactions with them at all. I could try finding out if they’d consider someone a customer who just bought the computer controller, but that would mean emailing them again.

And did I mention that VegRev’s kits cost two to three times as much as PlantDrive’s – before the list of add-ons that they recommend for each one? (To be fair, it’s not as much more if you factor in the cost of the tank. But even their one-tank system (where you don’t need to buy a second tank) is more than twice as expensive as PlantDrive’s one-tank system.)

No, I guess that in the great debate of VegRev vs. PlantDrive, PlantDrive wins. On the bright side, they’re both local companies. I emailed the PlantDrive folks to ask if they know where else to get WVO, and I suppose the next steps are to ask my mechanic what I would do for a tank, and to start contacting restaurants about taking their oil. Because seriously, the faster I’m not paying the high cost of gas, the happier I will be!